Every product management conference, every job description, every stakeholder conversation reinforces the same orthodoxy: be data-driven. Set up your funnel analytics. Run A/B tests. Track every button click. Build dashboards. The assumption is so deeply embedded that questioning it feels reckless. And yet, at Gathering #11 in Ghent, Quinten Vandermeulen walked onto stage and made an embarrassing confession.

Zero funnel analyses. Zero A/B tests. Zero button click tracking. As Co-founder and CPO of Mbrella, a mobility budget platform founded in 2020 that has raised EUR 10 million, grown to 40 people, and serves over 600 customers including ING, Danone, IKEA, VRT, and Westmalle Trappist, Quinten has built a product organization that is, by conventional standards, analytically illiterate. The results tell a different story.

A Net Promoter Score above 50, which is world-class for B2B SaaS. Zero customer churn across five years and 600 customers. A 4.7 out of 5 rating on the App Store. Revenue doubling each year for three consecutive years. The talk that followed was not a rejection of data. It was a provocation: what if the best product decisions come not from measuring clicks, but from measuring conversations?

The Secret: Dashboard-Poor, Customer-Rich

Quinten's framing was deliberate. He did not claim that data is useless or that analytics have no place in product development. He made a more specific argument: while everyone else was measuring clicks, Mbrella was measuring conversations with customers. The team invested the time and energy that most organizations spend on dashboards into direct, unmediated contact with the people using the product.

“While everyone else was measuring clicks, we were measuring conversations with customers.”

- Quinten Vandermeulen

This was not an accident or a resource constraint. It was a deliberate product philosophy. Quinten argued that at Mbrella's stage, the signal-to-noise ratio of customer conversations vastly exceeds what any dashboard can provide. A ten-minute call with a frustrated HR manager reveals more about what to build next than a month of funnel metrics.

Four Practices That Replace the Dashboard

The core of the talk was a set of four concrete practices that Mbrella uses to keep every team member connected to customer reality. These are not theoretical recommendations. Quinten showed real Slack messages, real session recordings, and real examples of how these practices shape daily decisions at the company.

check_circleEngineers shadow sales calls. Every engineer joins at least one live sales call per month. This is not optional. It is a reality check that prevents the engineering team from building in a vacuum. Quinten showed actual Slack coordination messages where engineers signed up for upcoming calls.

check_circleWatch user session recordings weekly. The engineering team watches Hotjar session recordings together every week. Seeing a real user struggle with a flow they built is worth more than any bug report or metric. The emotional impact of watching someone fail at something you designed changes how engineers think about their work.

check_circleWatch sales call recordings monthly. Using tools like Modjo and Gong, the team reviews recorded sales conversations to understand how prospects describe their problems, what objections they raise, and what language resonates. This builds shared vocabulary between product, engineering, and sales.

check_circleNo gatekeepers. There is no product manager or customer success person who filters customer feedback before it reaches engineering. Everyone touches the customer directly. Engineers, designers, and product people all have direct lines to customers.

Why Qualitative Data Builds Better Products

Quinten's argument for qualitative over quantitative data rested on two pillars. The first is that direct customer contact builds better judgement. Product taste, the ability to know intuitively whether a design decision is right, is a genuine differentiator. It does not develop by staring at charts. It develops by watching people use your product, hearing their frustrations, and internalizing their mental models. Without this exposure, engineers build from inside a bubble.

The second pillar is empowerment. Mbrella operates with high autonomy and significant decision-making power distributed to individual engineers. This only works if those engineers have the context and judgement to make good decisions. If decision-making authority is distributed but customer understanding is centralized in a product manager, the result is either bad decisions or bottlenecked decision-making.

“Code monkeys don't build great products. Customer-obsessed engineers do.”

- Quinten Vandermeulen

Five Pitfalls of Quantitative Data

The most provocative section of the talk was Quinten's breakdown of five specific ways that quantitative data leads product teams astray. He was careful to note that the problem is not data itself but the over-reliance on data at the expense of customer contact.

The illusion of knowledge. Once you have a dashboard, it is tempting to stop talking to users. You feel informed because the numbers are moving. But numbers without context create a dangerous sense of certainty about things you do not actually understand.

Only measures the measurable. Quantitative data captures what is easy to count, not what is important to understand. The most valuable product insights often live in the space between metrics: the workaround a user invented, the feature they expected to exist, the competitor they almost chose.

Databesitas. Quinten coined this term to describe organizations that are so stuffed with metrics they cannot move. Every decision requires another analysis, another dashboard, another data pull. The organization becomes analytically obese and operationally paralyzed.

Premature optimization. Dashboards naturally orient teams toward optimizing what exists rather than imagining what could exist. Customers give you innovation. Dashboards give you optimization. Both matter, but most teams over-index on the latter.

You cannot A/B test your way to taste. Great products are not assembled from a series of winning test variants. They are designed with a coherent vision that no combination of A/B tests can produce.

Craft Is the Differentiator

Quinten closed by zooming out to a larger argument about the future of product development. In what he described as the era of AI-generated mediocrity, where every company has access to the same tools and the same frameworks, craft becomes the differentiator. The ability to build something that feels right, that anticipates user needs before they are articulated, that works beautifully in the edge cases, that is not something a dashboard can teach you. It comes from spending time with customers.

lightbulbRecommended Resources

Quinten pointed to three resources that shaped his thinking. The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick for learning to talk to customers without leading them. Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug for understanding usability through observation. And the Linear CEO's talk at Figma Config, where he argued that at many companies, metrics replaced purpose and testing replaced judgement.

His final message was direct. Connect your engineers with customers. Build product intuition instead of more dashboards. Measure conversations, not clicks. In a world where everyone has the same data tools, the teams that win are the ones that understand their customers deeply enough to build what the data cannot yet see.

Dashboard-Poor, Customer-Rich: How Mbrella Built World-Class Product Without Analytics

The Secret: Dashboard-Poor, Customer-Rich

Four Practices That Replace the Dashboard

Why Qualitative Data Builds Better Products

Five Pitfalls of Quantitative Data

Craft Is the Differentiator

lightbulbRecommended Resources

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